Seventeen Cents

My idea of student life was always romantic in a specific, grubby way: perpetually broke, wandering the city, drinking your anxieties away at house parties, wearing the same three outfits because the laundromat was too far and getting there felt like a philosophical undertaking. Not glamorous. But alive. Kinetic.

Yesterday I got a small taste of it, because my friend Basti and I ate lunch at the Charité cafeteria. I know, I know—riveting stuff. But for someone who’s never really done the university thing properly, there was something genuinely appealing about it. Even if the food was overpriced, the seating was completely overwhelmed, and Basti spent the entire meal muttering something about lazy unshaven people and whales falling from the sky, which I’ve learned to accept as ambient noise.

I came home with a Mensa card with seventeen cents left on it, and I’m oddly pleased about this. It was also one of those first real spring days—the kind where everyone moves outside at once and the lawn fills up with people who look simultaneously exhausted and completely certain of themselves. I found myself wanting to know the story behind half those faces.

Then again, they’re probably just broke and wearing the same clothes as last week. Same as the dream, really.